Table of Contents

VOLUME XVIII.1 January + February 2011

Ron Wakkary, Erik Stolterman

As new co-editors-in-chief we welcome all readers to interactions magazine. It is an honor to be given the responsibility to carry on the work of our predecessors and to continually improve upon the publication on behalf of ACM SIGCHI. We see interactions as a mirror that reflects back what is…

Soft-Spiky Mouse: Designing Aesthetic Forms of Computational Objects The soft-spiky mouse changes its surface textures according to user behaviors. For example, if the user works with the mouse too long, the mouse displays spiky textures to raise awareness to the passage of time and/or the need for refreshment or break…

Arnie Lund, Bo Begole

SIGCHI has from the beginning been a community of communities. The field of human-computer interaction is built on the principles of diversity, balance, collaboration, and evolution. The strength of SIGCHI lies in seeing problems from multiple viewpoints and integrating expertise from multiple domains to find solutions and drive the creation…

Liz Danzico

My lists are shrinking. Not my to-do lists, unfortunately. Rather, my lists of resolutions. I recently had the opportunity to collect all of my New Year’s resolution lists in one place and noticed a trend. Lists from a decade ago or more had upwards of three dozen items, many of…

Elizabeth Churchill

Since the 1930s, governments have largely followed the view of John Maynard Keynes that spending, not saving, drives successful economies. We have taken this charge seriously in the U.S. If Adam Smith characterized Britain as a nation of shopkeepers, the U.S. is indubitably a nation of shoppers. No other country…

Bill Gaver

How would you describe your lab? First of all, we describe it as a studio, not a lab. We are interdisciplinary, but at our core we pursue our research as designers. We make physical devicestables, trolleys, tabletop appliancesin which interactional and material properties are designed as an integrated whole. They’re…

Yue Pan, Eli Blevis

Editor’s Note: Before this article is published, the first Special Session on Cloud Computing, HCI, and Design: Sustainability and Social Impacts of the Second IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2010) will have been held. This article is a shortened version of one that we will…

Elisa Giaccardi

As designers of interactive systems, we are increasingly asked to better understand what people value. At the core is the deeper question: What does it mean to be human? Understanding what makes us human influences how we design and what we design. It also places at the center of our…

Chris Danielsen, Anne Taylor, Wesley Majerus

Throughout most of human history, access to written information has been one of the greatest challenges faced by the blind. Until the invention of Braille, lack of access to written knowledge probably played a large role in the isolation of the blind from the rest of society. While the invention…

James Hollan

Editor’s note: I first worked with Jim Hollan as a grad student. I was a teaching assistant in the cognitive psychology laboratory course at UCSD 31 years ago. I worked for him again in the MCC Human Interface Laboratory (see Bill Curtis’s November + December 2010 “Timelines” column for his…

Hugh Dubberly, Shelley Evenson

Designers often speak of design as a process. Typically, design thinking leads to design making, which leads to artifacts. Yet the design process also leads to something moreto new knowledge. Thus, we might characterize designing as a form of learning. Curiously, the converse is also true. We might characterize learning…

Jonas Löwgren

“Oh, cool. It looks like a giant insect.” This might be your first thought when you look at Image 1 on the facing page and read the caption. If you have ever been to a Burning Man festival, you may also start reminiscing about the sun, the dust, and all…

Matt Jones

Sometimes dreams really do come true. Back in 2000, Keith Cheverst and colleagues published a paper outlining the functions and interactions made possible with the Guide system [1]. This mobile navigation aid allowed users to read location-dependent content and look at maps to see nearby places of interest; it also…

Erica Robles, Mikael Wiberg

Two hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, in a remote landscape dominated by the darkness of long winters, lies Sweden’s most popular tourist destinationthe Icehotel. For more than 20 years, this frozen edifice has served as a nexus for convening international teams of artists, designers, engineers, and architects. Each…

Roel Vertegaal

In his seminal book The Psychology of Everyday Things, Donald Norman outlined a world of things around us that are poorly designed because their designers did not apply psychology in the design process [1]. The idea that psychologists can answer questions about design, through a user-centered design process, is a…

Richard Arias-Hernández, John Dill, Brian Fisher, Tera Green

Defined as “The science of analytical reasoning supported by interactive visual interfaces” [1], visual analytics provides a scientific perspective on human interaction with complex graphical displays. Its goal is to support human decision making in situations characterized by complex “wicked problems” in diverse application domains. This article discusses the ways…

Davide Bolchini, Adam Neddo

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust Comprehensively modeling large interactive applications for analysis and design is a daunting task. Yet this activity is critical to mastering the organization of the overall information and navigation architecture of a website,…

Sal Cilella

Interaction design has developed organically, both as a field of study and as a design practice, alongside the evolution of desktop computing and the graphical user interface. Designing for the traditional desktopusing software, browsing a website, navigating an operating systeminvolved few variables beyond the screen. Little thought was given to…

“When you walk up to your computer, does the screen saver stop and the working windows reveal themselves? Does it even know if you are there? How hard would it be to change this? Is it not ironic that, in this regard, a motion-sensing light switch is “smarter” than any…